Issues with duplicating a new site within multisite for language switching

  • I am working on a project with a client who has an existing WordPress Multisite setup and 3 total sites — the main English site and two duplicates of that site with Spanish and Japanese translations.

    What I need to do

    Create a new duplicate of the main site at /de and translate to German.

    What I have done so far

    The cloner plugin was very basic and did not allow me to modify the URL. I found another plugin “NS-Cloner” with more options for customization. It required that the URL subdirectory be 4 characters or more, despite the other sites only being two characters (/es and /jn). To get around this I made the subdirectory “/german” and then once the site cloned, I went to the site settings and changed all the URLs to /de.

    This does not seem to have changed all the links however. On the My Sites page, the link to Visit Site and the Dashboard for the new site still point to /german (although when visiting /german I get a page not found error). Both /german/wp-admin and /de/wp-admin exist, but /de is not linked directly anywhere from My Sites.

    I created a new set of Multisite Language Switcher settings from the /de site, but that does not seem to have communicated with the other three sites. When I am on the MLS settings screen for English, I only see the three pre-existing sites to switch between. When I am on the MLS settings page for /de, I see all four sites.

    My Questions

    Is this really the best way to manage multiple languages on a site? Isn’t there a better way that would enable updates on the main English site to be pushed to the other sites?

    Did I make a mistake in the cloning process? Why didn’t modifying the site URL change the links to the dashboard and main site?

    Why does the multisite language switcher on the original three sites recognize the new German site settings?

    • This topic was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by mikeknerr67.
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  • I think you may need to go into the database for the de (German) specific site and correct all the URLs there from ‘German’ to ‘de’…

    Or you could possibly create a site for ‘de’ and export all the content for the ‘German’ site using Dashboard –> Tools –> Export and then Import that file(s) to the de site if your German content is already translated.

    Frankly, I’d have just went with the directory named ‘German’ myself or manually migrated what I needed. You could do some kind of redirect also if your client requires the two letter designation but that might really come back to haunt the next guy who needs to work on the site.

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